Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#911

Post by layer8 »

dathinab wrote: post #906

What is meant with AI-edited?? AI can do a grate job for grammar, spell and formulation checking/fixing without changing any content. I.e. just adding as a fancy version of extended spell checking. While I do currently not use it like that there shouldn't be any reason to ban it. And tbh. given some recent comments I have been really wondering if I should use it, because either there are quite a bunch of people with…

> without changing any content

It absolutely will change content if you ask it to reformulate or fix language style.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#912

Post by Cthulhu_ »

red_hare wrote: post #816
caditinpiscinam wrote: post #745

We've all heard the phrase "the sum of all human knowledge". I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.

I feel the same about Claude Code. It's a fast but average developer at just about everything and there are some things that average developers are just consistently bad at and therefore Claude is consistently bad at.

I'm not sure, I think you overestimate the average developer. But then, the average code doesn't end up in public repositories, it spends decades in enterprise codebases rotting.

At this point I'd rather review LLM generated code than a poor developer's.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#914

Post by wellpast »

One way to potentially discourage or curb AI-edited/written is integrate AI into HN so that your submissions get recommendations based on HN post guidelines such as “consider tone”, “substance” etc.

Then less motivation to jump out to external LLM to even get comments on your content which can temptingly lead to editing/generation.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#915

Post by palmotea »

> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

Where's the curiosity about this world-changing technology? As all the CTOs have recently said: AI use not an option and it must change everything we do. /s

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#916

Post by redbell »

First of all, I suggest that moderators add this to the comments' section in the linked guidelines. It should clearly states that pasting AI-generated replies is discouraged and does not fit within the community spirit.

Second, I have to confess that I did this sin a couple of times now, but I came to realize that this is neither good for me nor for the HN community. Although I used AI just for rephrasing, I decided to not do this ever and I'd rather write my own words with mistakes than post generated words based on my thoughts.

It happened for me once and it strikes me like a nuke and I felt truly embarrassed. A couple of months I wrote that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264786) then I asked ChatGPT to rephrase it and then mistakenly, pasted both comments, the original above and the generate one below and I hit submit. Shortly after, a user comes, read my comment and replied with that embarrassing reply and honestly, I deserve it. From that moment I realized how things can got messed up quickly when you rely heavily on that AI.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#917

Post by palmotea »

dang wrote: post #791
caditinpiscinam wrote: post #745

We've all heard the phrase "the sum of all human knowledge". I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.

Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed. Dostoevsky said that if all human knowledge could ever be reduced to 2 + 2 = 4, man would stick out his tongue and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. That was a 19th century formulation—he was a contemporary of Boole. I wonder what the equivalent would…

> Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.

The why not is: human beings are valuable in and of themselves, not just because of what they can do. If you raise the bar too high, you kick people out. And our society just isn't setup for that, and is unlikely to ever be in our lifetimes.

And I'm talking about a radical shift in the concept of ownership, where shareholding is radically democratized. Basically every random Joe needs the option to live comfortably on passive income generated by things he owns.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#918

Post by forgetfreeman »

There's an element of cognitive dissonance to the community's response to AI that I find fascinating. Nearly unanimous rejection of AI-generated content while simultaneously breathlessly touting AI tooling in significantly more sensitive (and lets face it riskier) environments like the company codebase.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#919

Post by palmotea »

dang wrote: post #426
arrsingh wrote: post #381

There should be a "flag as AI" link in addition to "flag" and then a setting for people to show flagged as AI. Once the flagged as AI reaches a certain threshold then it disappears unless you enable "Show AI". Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI. That would be cool. Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature…

We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so. A nice side effect is that it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem.

> We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so.

You need a reason that means "this person is talking about something helpful that an admin needs to fix." Flagging currently has a negative connotation (too many flags and the comment gets deleted), but sometimes you want to flag a comment that says something like "the link is broken and should be X" to just bring it to admin attention without the implied negative judgement.

Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

#920

Post by palmotea »

jedberg wrote: post #359

I'm absolutely 100% for this policy. My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI. (I…

> My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.

No, only if you oversimplify "good writing" to a set of linguistic tics. LLM writing isn't good, it just overuses certain features without much judgement or context awareness. Some of those are writerly.

Post reply on HN